Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Case for God (2009)

  Instead of being outcasts, Jews were central actors in the process that would redeem the universe, because their careful observance of Torah could end this universal displacement and effect the “restoration” (tikkun ) of the Shekhinah to the Godhead, the Jews to the Promised Land, and the rest of the world to its rightful state. 8 By 1650, Lurianic Kabbalah had become a mass movement in the Jewish world from Poland to Iran, the only Jewish theology at this time to win such wide acceptance. 9 Without the special rituals devised by Luria, this myth would have remained a senseless fiction. Weeping and rubbing their faces in the dust, Kabbalists made night vigils in order to confront their sorrow; they lay awake all night, calling out to God in their abandonment, and took long hikes in the Galilean countryside to act out their sense of homelessness. But there was no wallowing: Kabbalists were required to work through their pain in a disciplined, stylized manner until it gave way to a measure of joy. Vigils always finished at dawn with a meditation on the end of humanity’s estrangement from the divine. Kabbalists practiced disciplines of concentration (kawwanoth ) that evoked from the farthest reaches of the psyche a wonder and delight that they had not known they possessed. Compassion was a crucial Lurianic virtue, and there were severe penances for faults that injured others: Jews who had suffered so much themselves must not increase the sum of grief in the world. 10 After the disaster of 1492, many Jews had retreated from the falsafah that had been so popular in Spain and found that the new mythos and its rituals enabled them to make contact with the deeper roots of their grief and to discover a source of healing. 11 But in the new world that was coming into being in Europe, this type of creative mythos would soon be a thing of the past. Other European countries were in the throes of the same transformation as Spain, even though at this early stage few were aware of its magnitude. By the sixteenth century, the people of the West had started to create an entirely new and unprecedented type of civilization that depended on a radical change in the economic base of society.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  He was twenty-four years old. He was the exact age I’d been when I left with Carter for Hawaii. In other words, when my life began. At twenty-four I didn’t yet know who I was, and Pre not only knew who he was, the world knew. He died holding every American distance record from 2,000 meters to 10,000 meters, from two miles to six miles. Of course, what he really held, what he’d captured and kept and now would never let go of, was our imaginations. In his eulogy Bowerman talked about Pre’s athletic feats, of course, but insisted that Pre’s life and his legend were about larger, loftier things. Yes, Bowerman said, Pre was determined to become the best runner in the world, but he wanted to be so much more. He wanted to break the chains placed on all runners by petty bureaucrats and bean counters. He wanted to smash the silly rules holding back amateur athletes and keeping them poor, preventing them from realizing their potential. As Bowerman finished, as he stepped from the podium, I thought he looked much older, almost feeble. Watching him walk unsteadily back to his chair, I couldn’t conceive how he’d ever found the strength to deliver those words. Penny and I didn’t follow the cortege to the cemetery. We couldn’t. We were too overwrought. We didn’t talk to Bowerman, either, and I don’t know that I ever talked to him thereafter about Pre’s death. Neither of us could bear it. Later I heard that something was happening at the spot where Pre died. It was becoming a shrine. People were visiting it every day, leaving flowers, letters, notes, gifts—Nikes. Someone should collect it all, I thought, keep it in a safe place. I recalled the many holy sites I’d visited in 1962. Someone needed to curate Pre’s rock, and I decided that someone needed to be us. We didn’t have money for anything like that. But I talked it over with Johnson and Woodell and we agreed that, as long as we were in business, we’d find money for things like that. 1976Now that we’d gotten past our bank crisis, now that I was reasonably sure of not going to jail, I could go back to asking the deep questions. What are we trying to build here? What kind of company do we want to be? Like most companies, we had role models. Sony, for instance. Sony was the Apple of its day. Profitable, innovative, efficient—and it treated its workers well. When pressed, I often said I wanted to be like Sony. At root, however, I still aimed and hoped for something bigger, and vaguer.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She hoisted her scuttle of coal a little higher, then came to take my tray and ask me, ‘Would there be anything else?’ I answered that she might run me a bath; and she curtseyed. And when I lay soaking in the bathroom I heard the slam of the front door. It was Diana. She came to find me. She had been to the Cavendish, but only to take a letter that must be signed by another lady. ‘I didn’t like to wake you,’ she said, dipping her hand into the water. I forgot about Blake, then, and how handsome she was. I forgot about Blake, indeed, for a month or more. Diana gave dinners, and I posed and wore costumes; we made visits to the club, and to Maria’s house in Hampstead. All went on as usual. I was occasionally sulky, but, as on the night of our trip to the opera, she found ways of turning my sulkiness to her own lewd advantage - in the end, I hardly knew if I were really cross or only feigning crossness for the sake of her letches. Once or twice I hoped she would make me cross - fucking her in a rage, I found, could at the right moment be more thrilling than fucking her in kindness. Anyway, we went on like this. Then one night there was some quarrel over a suit. We were dressing for a supper at Maria‘s, and I would not wear the clothes she picked for me. ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘you may wear what you please!’ And she took the carriage, and went off to Hampstead without me. I threw a cup against the wall — then sent for Blake to come and tidy it. And when she came, I remembered how pleasant it had been to chat with her before; and I made her sit with me, and tell me more about her plans. And after that, she would come and spend a minute or two with me whenever Diana was out; and she became easier with me, and I grew freer with her. And at last I said to her: ‘Lord, Blake, you’ve been emptying my pot for me for more than a year, and I don’t even know what your first name is!’ She smiled, and again looked handsome. Her name was Zena. Her name was Zena, and her story was a sad one. I had it from her one morning in the autumn of that year, as I lay in Diana’s bed, and she came, as usual, to bring breakfast and to see to the fire. Diana herself had risen early, and gone out. I woke to find Zena kneeling at the hearth, working quietly with the coals so as not to disturb me. I shifted beneath the sheets, feeling lazy as an eel. My quim - in the clever way of quims - was still quite slippery, from the passion of the night before.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  It was becoming a shrine. People were visiting it every day, leaving flowers, letters, notes, gifts—Nikes. Someone should collect it all, I thought, keep it in a safe place. I recalled the many holy sites I’d visited in 1962. Someone needed to curate Pre’s rock, and I decided that someone needed to be us. We didn’t have money for anything like that. But I talked it over with Johnson and Woodell and we agreed that, as long as we were in business, we’d find money for things like that.

• From Educated (2018)

  “The hospital called,” she said. “Grandma’s gone.” —MY FATHER LOST HIS appetite for the business. He started getting out of bed later and later, and when he did, it seemed it was only to insult or accuse. He shouted at Shawn about the junkyard and lectured Mother about her management of the employees. He snapped at Audrey when she tried to make him lunch, and barked at me for typing too loudly. It was as if he wanted to fight, to punish himself for the old woman’s death. Or perhaps the punishment was for her life, for the conflict that had been between them, which had only ended now she was dead. The house slowly filled again. The phones were reconnected, and women materialized to answer them. Dad’s desk remained empty. He spent his days in bed, gazing up at the stucco ceiling. I brought him supper, as I had as a child, and wondered now, as I’d wondered then, whether he knew I was there. Mother moved about the house with the vitality of ten people, mixing tinctures and essential oils, directing her employees between making funeral arrangements and cooking for every cousin and aunt who dropped in unannounced to reminisce about Grandma. As often as not I’d find her in an apron, hovering over a roast with a phone in each hand, one a client, the other an uncle or friend calling to offer condolences. Through all this my father remained in bed. Dad spoke at the funeral. His speech was a twenty-minute sermon on God’s promises to Abraham. He mentioned my grandmother twice. To strangers it must have seemed he was hardly affected by the loss of his mother, but we knew better, we who could see the devastation. When we arrived home from the service, Dad was incensed that lunch wasn’t ready. Mother scrambled to serve the stew she’d left to slow-cook, but after the meal Dad seemed equally frustrated by the dishes, which Mother hurriedly cleaned, and then by his grandchildren, who played noisily while Mother dashed about trying to hush them. That evening, when the house was empty and quiet, I listened from the living room as my parents argued in the kitchen. “The least you could do,” Mother said, “is fill out these thank-you cards. It was your mother, after all.” “That’s wifely work,” Dad said. “I’ve never heard of a man writing cards.” He had said the exact wrong thing. For ten years, Mother had been the primary breadwinner, while continuing to cook meals, clean the house, do the laundry, and I had never once heard her express anything like resentment. Until now. “Then you should do the husband’s work, ” she said, her voice raised. Soon they were both shouting. Dad tried to corral her, to subdue her with a show of anger, the way he always had, but this only made her more stubborn. Eventually she tossed the cards on the table and said, “Fill them out or don’t.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I knew then that the only answer to such poverty is entry-level jobs. Lots of them. I didn’t form this theory on my own. I heard it from every economics professor I ever had, at both Oregon and Stanford, and everything I saw and read thereafter backed it up. International trade always, always benefits both trading nations. Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.” Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity. That’s why, haunted as I was by the Vietnam War, I always vowed that someday Nike would have a factory in or near Saigon. By 1997 we had four. I was very proud. And when I learned that we were to be honored and celebrated by the Vietnamese government as one of the nation’s top five generators of foreign currency, I felt that I simply had to visit. What a wrenching trip. I don’t know if I’d appreciated the full depth of my hatred for the war in Vietnam until I returned twenty-five years after the peace, until I joined hands with our former antagonists. At one point my hosts graciously asked what they could do for me, what would make my trip special or memorable. I got a lump in my throat. I didn’t want them to go to any trouble, I said. But they insisted. Okay, I said, okay, I’d like to meet eighty-six-year-old General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the Vietnamese MacArthur, the man who single-handedly defeated the Japanese, the French, the Americans, and the Chinese. My hosts stared in amazed silence. Slowly they rose and excused themselves and stood off in a corner, conversing in frantic Vietnamese. After five minutes they came back. Tomorrow, they said. One hour. I bowed deeply. Then counted the minutes until the big meeting. The first thing I noticed as General Giáp entered the room was his size. This brilliant fighter, this genius tactician who’d organized the Tet Offensive, who’d planned those miles and miles of underground tunnels, this giant of history, came up to my shoulders. He was, maybe , five foot four. And humble. No corncob pipe for Giáp. I remember that he wore a dark business suit, like mine. I remember that he smiled as I did—shyly, uncertainly. But there was an intensity about him. I’d seen that kind of glittery confidence in great coaches, and great business leaders, the elite of the elite. I never saw it in a mirror. He knew I had questions. He waited for me to ask them. I said simply: “How did you do it?” I thought I saw the corners of his mouth flicker. A smile? Maybe? He thought. And thought. “I was,” he said, “a professor of the jungle.” THOUGHTS OF ASIA always lead back to Nissho. Where on earth would we have been without Nissho?

• From Educated (2018)

  It was the first time I’d seen Nick since the explosion. I might have told him everything right then: that my family didn’t believe in modern medicine; that we were treating the burn at home with salves and homeopathy; that it had been terrifying, worse than terrifying; that for as long as I lived I would never forget the smell of charred flesh. I could have told him all that, could have surrendered the weight, let the bond between us carry it and grow stronger. Instead I kept the burden for myself, and my friendship with Nick, already anemic, underfed and underused, dwindled in obsolescence. I believed I could repair the damage—that now I was back, this would be my life, and it wouldn’t matter that Nick understood nothing of Buck’s Peak. But the peak refused to give me up. It clung to me. The black craters in my father’s chest often materialized on chalkboards, and I saw the sagging cavity of his mouth on the pages of my textbooks. This remembered world was somehow more vivid than the physical world I inhabited, and I phased between them. Nick would take my hand, and for a moment I would be there with him, feeling the surprise of his skin on mine. But when I looked at our joined fingers, something would shift so that the hand was not Nick’s. It was bloody and clawed, not a hand at all. When I slept, I gave myself wholly to the peak. I dreamed of Luke, of his eyes rolling back in his head. I dreamed of Dad, of the slow rattle in his lungs. I dreamed of Shawn, of the moment my wrist had cracked in the parking lot. I dreamed of myself, limping beside him, laughing that high, horrible cackle. But in my dreams I had long, silvery hair. —THE WEDDING WAS IN SEPTEMBER. I arrived at the church full of anxious energy, as though I’d been sent through time from some disastrous future to this moment, when my actions still had weight and my thoughts, consequences. I didn’t know what I’d been sent to do, so I wrung my hands and chewed my cheeks, waiting for the crucial moment. Five minutes before the ceremony, I vomited in the women’s bathroom. When Emily said “I do,” the vitality left me. I again became a spirit, and drifted back to BYU. I stared at the Rockies from my bedroom window and was struck by how implausible they seemed. Like paintings. A week after the wedding I broke up with Nick—callously, I’m ashamed to say. I never told him of my life before, never sketched for him the world that had invaded and obliterated the one he and I had shared. I could have explained. I could have said, “That place has a hold on me, which I may never break.” That would have got to the heart of it. Instead I sank through time.

• From Educated (2018)

  I understood why. The sight of Tyler loading boxes into his car made me crazed. I wanted to scream but instead I ran, out the back door and up through the hills toward the peak. I ran until the sound of blood pulsing in my ears was louder than the thoughts in my head; then I turned around and ran back, swinging around the pasture to the red railroad car. I scrambled onto its roof just in time to see Tyler close his trunk and turn in a circle, as if he wanted to say goodbye but there was no one to say goodbye to. I imagined him calling my name and pictured his face falling when I didn’t answer. He was in the driver’s seat by the time I’d climbed down, and the car was rumbling down the dirt road when I leapt out from behind an iron tank. Tyler stopped, then got out and hugged me—not the crouching hug that adults often give children but the other kind, both of us standing, him pulling me into him and bringing his face close to mine. He said he would miss me, then he let me go, stepping into his car and speeding down the hill and onto the highway. I watched the dust settle. Tyler rarely came home after that. He was building a new life for himself across enemy lines. He made few excursions back to our side. I have almost no memory of him until five years later, when I am fifteen, and he bursts into my life at a critical moment. By then we are strangers. It would be many years before I would understand what leaving that day had cost him, and how little he had understood about where he was going. Tony and Shawn had left the mountain, but they’d left to do what my father had taught them to do: drive semis, weld, scrap. Tyler stepped into a void. I don’t know why he did it and neither does he. He can’t explain where the conviction came from, or how it burned brightly enough to shine through the black uncertainty. But I’ve always supposed it was the music in his head, some hopeful tune the rest of us couldn’t hear, the same secret melody he’d been humming when he bought that trigonometry book, or saved all those pencil shavings. —SUMMER WANED, SEEMING TO evaporate in its own heat. The days were still hot but the evenings had begun to cool, the frigid hours after sunset claiming more of each day. Tyler had been gone a month. I was spending the afternoon with Grandma-over-in-town. I’d had a bath that morning, even though it wasn’t Sunday, and I’d put on special clothes with no holes or stains so that, scrubbed and polished, I could sit in Grandma’s kitchen and watch her make pumpkin cookies. The autumn sun poured in through gossamer curtains and onto marigold tiles, giving the whole room an amber glow.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Maybe if he’d had a little more insecurity… In his quest to find himself, he dropped out of college. He experimented, dabbled, rebelled, argued, ran away. Nothing worked. Then, at last, in 2000, he seemed to enjoy being a husband, a father, a philanthropist. He got involved in Mi Casa, Su Casa, a charity building an orphanage in El Salvador. On one of his visits there, after a few days of hard, satisfying work, he took a break. He drove with two friends to Ilopango, a deep-water lake, to go scuba diving. For some reason he decided to see how deep he could go. He decided to take a risk that even his risk-addicted father would never take. Something went wrong. At 150 feet my son lost consciousness. If I were to think about Matthew in his final moments, fighting for air, I believe my imagination could get me very close to how he must have felt. After the thousands of miles I’ve logged as a runner, I know that feeling of fighting for that next breath. But I won’t let my imagination go there, ever. Still, I’ve talked to the two friends who were with him. I’ve read everything I’ve been able to get my hands on about diving accidents. When things go wrong, I’ve learned, a diver often feels something called “the martini effect.” He thinks everything is okay. Better than okay. He feels euphoric. That must have happened to Matthew, I tell myself, because at the last second he pulled out his mouthpiece. I choose to believe this euphoria scenario, to believe that my son didn’t suffer at the end. That my son was happy. I choose, because it’s the only way I can go on. Penny and I were at the movies when we found out. We’d gone to the five o’clock showing of Shrek 2. In the middle of the movie we turned and saw Travis standing in the aisle. Travis. Travis? He was whispering to us in the dark. “You guys need to come with me.” We walked up the aisle, out of the theater, from darkness to light. As we emerged he said, “I just got a phone call from El Salvador…” Penny fell to the floor. Travis helped her up. He put his arm around his mother and I staggered away, to the end of the hallway, tears streaming. I recall seven strange unbidden words running through my head, over and over, like a fragment of some poem: So this is the way it ends. BY THE NEXT morning the news was everywhere. Internet, radio, newspapers, TV, all blaring the bare facts. Penny and I pulled the blinds, locked the doors, cut ourselves off. But not before our niece Brittany moved in with us. To this day I believe that she saved our lives. Every Nike athlete wrote, emailed, phoned. Every single one. But the first was Tiger. His call came in at 7:30 a.m. I will never, ever forget.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I looked. Hundreds of faces. Dad’s colleagues, Dad’s friends. The fear vanished in an instant. I couldn’t be scared any more. And I started speaking. I told them about my father. I told them a little about his early life. I told them he had been a wonderful father. I reminded them, too, of his ridiculous inability to wear anything other than a suit – although he did make concessions on holiday, and occasionally removed his tie. I told them that on our trip to Cornwall to photograph the total eclipse we’d been standing on the beach before the skies darkened when a man who said he was the reincarnation of King Arthur, a man wearing a silver diadem and long white robes, came up to Dad, and said, bewildered, Why are you wearing that suit? Well, said Dad. You never know who you’re going to meet. And then I told the story I hoped they would understand. He’s a boy, standing by a fence and staring up at the sky. He’s at an aerodrome, Biggin Hill, spotting RAF planes. He is nine? Ten? He’s been photographing each aircraft that takes off or lands with the Box Brownie camera that hangs on a string around his neck, and putting their numbers down in a spiral-bound notebook. It is getting late. He ought to leave. Then he hears a sound he cannot place, an unfamiliar engine note, and yes, there, this is it, this is the moment he has dreamed of. He stares into the sky. He sees the landing lights of . . . he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know what it is. It is not in any of the books. He takes its picture. He copies its registration number onto the page. It is a visitation from the future: a new American Air Force plane. To the boy plane-spotter of the 1950s, it is like seeing the Holy Grail. When I was writing the speech, still a little concussed, I reached for the phone to call my father and ask what type of plane it was, and for a moment the world went very black.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And even so there were those moments of tenderness—even more brutal because they didnt last: times in which, when he got paid, he would fill the house with presents—flowers for my mother (incongruous in that patched-up house, until they withered and blended with the drabness), toys for us. Even during the poorest Christmas we went through when we were kids—and after the fearful times of putting up the Nacimiento—he would make sure we all had presents—not clothes, which we needed but didnt want, but toys, which we wanted but didnt need. And Sundays he would take us to Juarez to dinner, leaving an exorbitant tip for the suddenly attentive waiter.... But in the ocean of his hatred, those times of kindness were mere islands. He burned with an anger at life, which had chewed him up callously: an anger which blazed more fiercely as he sank further beneath the surface of his once almost-realized dream of musical glory. One of the last touches on the Nacimiento was two pieces of craggy wood, which looked very heavy, like rocks (very much like the piece of petrified wood which my father kept on his desk, to warn us that once it had been the hand of a child who had struck his father, and God had turned the child’s hand into stone). The pieces of rocklike wood were located on either side of the manger, like hills. On top of one, my father placed a small statue of a red-tailed, horned Devil, drinking out of a bottle. Around that time I had a dream which still recurs (and later, in New Orleans, I will experience it awake). We would get colds often in that drafty house, and fever, and during such times I dreamt this: Those pieces of rocklike wood on the sides of the manger are descending on me, to crush me. When I brace for the smashing terrible impact, they become soft, and instead of crushing me they envelop me like melted wax. Sometimes I will dream theyre draped with something like cheesecloth, a tenebrous, thin tissue touching my face like spiderwebs, gluing itself to me although I struggle to tear it away.... When my brothers and sisters all got married and left home—to Escape, I would think—I remained, and my father’s anger was aimed even more savagely at me. He sat playing solitaire for hours. He calls me over, begins to talk in a very low, deceptively friendly tone. When my mother and I fell asleep, he told me, he would set fire to the house and we would burn inside while he looked on.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Many were wearing Pre Montreals. (Many more were wearing Exeter-made products like the Triumph and the Vainqueur. Hayward that day looked like a Nike showroom.) It was well known that these trials would have been the start of Pre’s epic comeback. After being knocked down in Munich, he’d have risen again, no doubt, and the rising would have begun right here, right now. Each race prompted the same thoughts, the same image: Pre bursting ahead of the pack. Pre diving through the tape. We could see it. We could see him flush with victory. If only, we kept saying, our voices choking, if only. At sunset the sky turned red, white, and a deep blackish blue. But it was still bright enough to read by as the runners in the 10,000 meters gathered at the starting line. Penny and I tried to clear our minds as we stood, hands clasped as if in prayer. We were counting on Shorter, of course. He was extremely talented, and he’d been the last person to see Pre alive—it made sense that he’d be the one to carry Pre’s torch. But we also had Nikes on Craig Virgin, a brilliant young runner from the University of Illinois, and on Garry Bjorklund, a lovable veteran from Minnesota, who was trying to come back from surgery to remove a loose bone in his foot. The gun went off, the runners shot forward, all bunched tight, and Penny and I were bunched tight, too, oohing and aahing with every stride. There wasn’t an inch of separation in the pack until the halfway mark, when Shorter and Virgin violently pushed ahead. In the jostling, Virgin accidentally stepped on Bjorklund and sent his Nike flying. Now Bjorklund’s tender, surgically repaired foot was bare, exposed, smacking the hard track with every stride. And yet Bjorklund didn’t stop. He didn’t falter. He didn’t even slow down. He just kept running, faster and faster, and that blazing show of courage won over the crowd. I think we cheered for him as loudly as we’d cheered for Pre the year before. Entering the final lap, Shorter and Virgin were in front. Penny and I were jumping up and down. “We’re going to get two,” we said, “we’re going to get two!” And then we got three. Shorter and Virgin took first and second, and Bjorklund plunged ahead of Bill Rodgers at the tape to take third. I was covered with sweat. Three Olympians… in Nikes! The next morning, rather than take a victory lap at Hayward, we set up camp at the Nike store. While Johnson and I mingled with customers, Penny manned the silk-screen machine and churned out Nike T-shirts. Her craftsmanship was exquisite; all day long people came in to say they’d seen someone wearing a Nike T-shirt on the street and they just had to have one for themselves.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Penny and I drove to Eugene, where we met up with Johnson, who was photographing the event. Despite our excitement about the trials, we talked most about Pre as we took our seats in the packed bleachers. It was clear that Pre was on everyone else’s mind, too. We heard his name coming from every direction, and his spirit seemed to hover like the low clouds roiling above the track. And if you were tempted to forget him, even for a moment, you got another bracing reminder when you looked at the runners’ feet. Many were wearing Pre Montreals. (Many more were wearing Exeter-made products like the Triumph and the Vainqueur. Hayward that day looked like a Nike showroom.) It was well known that these trials would have been the start of Pre’s epic comeback. After being knocked down in Munich, he’d have risen again, no doubt, and the rising would have begun right here, right now. Each race prompted the same thoughts, the same image: Pre bursting ahead of the pack. Pre diving through the tape. We could see it. We could see him flush with victory. If only, we kept saying, our voices choking, if only. At sunset the sky turned red, white, and a deep blackish blue. But it was still bright enough to read by as the runners in the 10,000 meters gathered at the starting line. Penny and I tried to clear our minds as we stood, hands clasped as if in prayer. We were counting on Shorter, of course. He was extremely talented, and he’d been the last person to see Pre alive—it made sense that he’d be the one to carry Pre’s torch. But we also had Nikes on Craig Virgin, a brilliant young runner from the University of Illinois, and on Garry Bjorklund, a lovable veteran from Minnesota, who was trying to come back from surgery to remove a loose bone in his foot. The gun went off, the runners shot forward, all bunched tight, and Penny and I were bunched tight, too, oohing and aahing with every stride. There wasn’t an inch of separation in the pack until the halfway mark, when Shorter and Virgin violently pushed ahead. In the jostling, Virgin accidentally stepped on Bjorklund and sent his Nike flying. Now Bjorklund’s tender, surgically repaired foot was bare, exposed, smacking the hard track with every stride. And yet Bjorklund didn’t stop. He didn’t falter. He didn’t even slow down. He just kept running, faster and faster, and that blazing show of courage won over the crowd. I think we cheered for him as loudly as we’d cheered for Pre the year before.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  You hurt yourself! I said. Oh, that , he said, threading another spring onto the trampoline we were building for my niece. Did that the other day. Can’t remember how. On something or other. It’ll be all right though. It’ll be healed soon, it’s healing fine. That was when the old world leaned in, whispered farewells and was gone. I ran into the night. I had to drive back to Hampshire. I had to go now . Because the cut would not. It would not heal. Here’s a word. Bereavement . Or, Bereaved . Bereft . It’s from the Old English bereafian , meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try . ‘Imagine , ’ I said , back then , to some friends, in an earnest attempt to explain, ‘imagine your whole family is in a room. Yes, all of them. All the people you love. So then what happens is someone comes into the room and punches you all in the stomach. Each one of you. Really hard. So you’re all on the floor . Right? So the thing is , you all share the same kind of pain, exactly the same, but you’re too busy experiencing total agony to feel anything other than completely alone. That’s what it’s like!’ I finished my little speech in triumph, convinced that I’d hit upon the perfect way to explain how it felt. I was puzzled by the pitying, horrified faces, because it didn’t strike me at all that an example that put my friends’ families in rooms and had them beaten might carry the tang of total lunacy. I can’t, even now, arrange it in the right order. The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don’t make a story. One day we were walking from Waterloo to the hospital under clouds. Breathing seemed an act of discipline. Mum turned to me, her face tight, and said, ‘There’ll be a time when all this seems like a bad dream.’ His glasses, carefully folded, placed in my mum’s outstretched hand. His coat. An envelope. His watch. His shoes. And when we left, clutching a plastic bag with his belongings, the clouds were still there, a frieze of motionless cumulus over the Thames flat as a matte painting on glass. At Waterloo Bridge we leant over Portland stone and looked at the water below. I smiled for the first time, then, I think, since the phone call. Partly because the water was sliding down to the sea and this simple physics still made sense when the rest of the world didn’t. And partly because a decade before, Dad had invented a gloriously eccentric weekend side-project. He’d decided to photograph every single bridge over the Thames.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I had hunted with hawks for years before death meant anything to me at all. Perhaps I was then to all intents a child. I’d never considered what I was doing was cruel. I was a spectator, not a killer. Wild hawks hunted; so did mine. There seemed no useful moral difference. And falconry for me was about revelling in the flight of the hawk, never in the death it brought. But when my hawk caught things I was pleased – partly for the hawk, and partly because I had, as a child, bought into that imagined world of tweed-clad Victorian falconers, where death was visceral and ever-present and hedged with ceremonial formalities. When I watched those men with goshawks put the dead pheasant in the bag all those years ago I saw a kind of ease that bespoke centuries of social privilege and sporting confidence. And the vocabulary I’d learned from the books distanced me from death. Trained hawks didn’t catch animals. They caught quarry. They caught game. What an extraordinary term. Game. I sat quietly watching the line and wondered. I would hunt with this hawk. Of course I would. Training a goshawk and not letting it hunt seemed to me like raising a child and not letting it play. But that was not why I needed her. To me she was bright, vital, secure in her place in the world. Every tiny part of her was boiling with life, as if from a distance you could see a plume of steam around her, coiling and ascending and making everything around her slightly blurred, so she stood out in fierce, corporeal detail. The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings. But I had forgotten that the puzzle that was death was caught up in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too. ‘To him I am still the rarely tolerated enemy, and to me he is always the presence of death,’ White wrote of Gos in his notebook. ‘Death will be my last failure.’ His neglect had made Gos wild again, and the hawk had become death to him because it could not be beaten. For six weeks he had struggled with it and the struggle had been as Jacob’s with the angel. ‘I have lived for this hawk,’ he wrote in despair. ‘I have gone half bird myself, transforming my love and interest and livelihood into its future, giving hostages to fortune as madly as in marriage and family cares. If the hawk dies almost all my present me dies with it. It has treated me today as if I were a dangerous and brutal enemy never seen before.’

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  An hour passed before I could go back downstairs. At some point that night I gave up the Kleenex and just draped a towel over my shoulder. A move I learned from another beloved coach—John Thompson. Strasser passed suddenly, too. Heart attack, 1993. He was so young, it was a tragedy, all the more so because it came after we’d had a falling out. Strasser had been instrumental in signing Jordan, in building up the Jordan brand and wrapping it around Rudy’s air soles. Air Jordan changed Nike, took us to the next level, and the next, but it changed Strasser, too. He felt that he should no longer be taking orders from anyone, including me. Especially me. We clashed, too many times, and he quit. It might have been okay if he’d just quit. But he went to work for Adidas. An intolerable betrayal. I never forgave him. (Though I did recently—happily, proudly—hire his daughter, Avery. Twenty-two years old, she works in Special Events, and she’s said to be thriving. It’s a blessing and a joy to see her name in the company directory.) I wish Strasser and I had patched things up before he died, but I don’t know that it was possible. We were both born to compete, and we were both bad at forgiving. For both of us, betrayal was extra potent kryptonite. I felt that same sense of betrayal when Nike came under attack for conditions in our overseas factories—the so-called sweatshop controversy. Whenever reporters said a factory was unsatisfactory, they never said how much better it was than the day we first went in. They never said how hard we’d worked with our factory partners to upgrade conditions, to make them safer and cleaner. They never said these factories weren’t ours, that we were renters, one among many tenants. They simply searched until they found a worker with complaints about conditions, and they used that worker to vilify us, and only us, knowing our name would generate maximum publicity. Of course my handling of the crisis only made it worse. Angry, hurt, I often reacted with self-righteousness, petulance, anger. On some level I knew my reaction was toxic, counterproductive, but I couldn’t stop myself. It’s just not easy to remain even-keeled when you wake up one day, thinking you’re creating jobs and helping poor countries modernize and enabling athletes to achieve greatness, only to find yourself being burned in effigy outside the flagship retail store in your own hometown. The company reacted as I did. Emotionally. Everyone was reeling. Many late nights in Beaverton, you’d find all the lights on, and soul-searching conversations taking place in various conference rooms and offices. Though we knew that much of the criticism was unjust, that Nike was a symbol, a scapegoat, more than the true culprit, all of that was beside the point. We had to admit: We could do better. We told ourselves: We must do better. Then we told the world: Just watch.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I was a lucky child. Until I saw that pheasant die in a winter hedge, all I knew of death came from books – and one kind in particular. I was looking at a whole shelf of them now. That morning I’d filled the car with boxes, put Mabel on her passenger-seat perch and driven back to my parents’ house for the weekend. My parents’ house. I supposed it was my mother’s house now. I had come back because I was preparing to move. A dear friend had offered me his house while he and his family went to China for a few months, and I was impossibly grateful to them, but the prospect of losing my beautiful college house was hateful. I stacked the boxes in the garage then sat with my mother in the kitchen while Mabel loafed and bathed and preened on the sunny lawn. We drank tea, reminisced, talked about Dad and times gone by. There was a lot of laughter. It was good to see her. But it was not easy to be there. We sat in chairs that Dad should be sitting in, drank from cups he had drunk from, and when I saw his careful handwriting on a note pinned by the back door it got too much. Much too much. I ran into my old room, sat on the little bed and hugged my knees, pain worming around inside my chest like a thing with a million tiny teeth and claws. I looked up at the top of my old bookshelves. There, dusty and unread for years, were all the animal books of my childhood. I’d loved these books. They were rich with wildness, escape and adventure. But I hated them too. Because they never had happy endings. Tarka the otter was killed by hounds. The falcons died of pesticide poisoning. A man with a spade beat to death the otter in Ring of Bright Water; vultures tore out the Red Pony’s eyes. The deer in The Yearling was shot, the dog in Old Yeller died. So did the spider in Charlotte’s Web and my favourite rabbit in Watership Down. I remember that awful dread as the number of pages shrank in each new animal book I read. I knew what would happen. And it happened every time. So I suppose it wasn’t a surprise to eight-year-old me that Gos snapped his leash and was lost in the wind and rain. I greeted it with sad resignation. But it was dreadful all the same.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Miss Destiny says to me. “She offered him a Cadillac! Pauline! Who hasnt even got enough to keep her dragclothes in proper shape!... But nevuhmind, let him be gullible (thats someone who believes untrue stories). And, besides,” she says with a toss of her head, “I flipped over Sandy, a bad new stud.... But Chuck’s still jealous of me—he knows Im looking for a new husband—now that poor Sandy (my most recent ex, dear) got busted, and I know he didnt have any hard narcotics on him like they say he did—they planted them in his car—... Shake that moneymakuh, honey!—” (this to a spadequeen swishing by) “—and I still love my Sandy—did the best I could, tried to bail him out, hire a good attuhnee, but it was no good—they laughed when I said he was my husband. The quality of muhcee is mighty strained indeed—as the dear Portia said (from Shakespeare, my dears—a very Great writer who wrote ladies’ roles for dragqueens in his time). And it breaks my heart to think of my poor Sandy in the joint away from women all that time, him so redhot he might turn queer, but oh no not my Sandy, hes all stud. If I know him, he’ll come out of the joint rich, hustling the guards.... And I tried to be faithful—but the years will be so long—and what can a girl do, and restless the way I am?—restless and crying muhself to sleep night aftuh night, missing him—missing him. But my dears, I realize I Will Have To Go On—he would want it that way. Well, queens have died eaten by the ah worm of ah love, as the Lovely Cleopatra said—she was The Queen of Ancient Egypt—” (quoting, misquoting Shakespeare—saying it was a lovely he-roine who said it in the play—taking it for granted—a safe assumption in her world—that no one will understand her anyway). “Then Miss Thing said to me (Miss Thing is a fairy perched on my back like some people have a monkey or a conscience),” she explained, “well, Miss Thing said to me, ‘Miss Destiny dear, dont be a fool, fix your lovey rair and find you a new husband—make it permanent this time by really getting Married—and even if you have to stretch your unemployment, dont allow him to push or hustle’ (which breaks up a marriage)—and Miss Thing said, ‘Miss Destiny dear, have a real wedding this time.’... A real wedding,” Miss Destiny sighed wistfully. “Like every young girl should have at least once.... And when it happens oh it will be the most simpuhlee Fabulous wedding the Westcoast has evuh seen! with oh the most beautiful queens as bridesmaids! and the handsomest studs as ushers! (and you will absolutely have to remove chose boots, Chuck)—and Me! ...

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He’d decided to photograph every single bridge over the Thames. I went with him, sometimes, on Saturday mornings, driving up into the Cotswolds. My dad had been my dad, but also my friend, and a partner in crime when it came to quests like this. From the grassy source near Cirencester we walked and explored, followed a wormy, muddy stream, trespassed to take photos of planks over it, got shouted at by farmers, menaced by cattle, pored over maps in fierce concentration. It took a year. He did it, in the end. Every single bridge. Somewhere in the files of slides back at my mum’s house is a complete photographic record of ways to cross the Thames from source to sea. On another day, the panic was that we might not find his car. He’d parked it somewhere near Battersea Bridge and, of course, had never returned. We looked for it for hours, increasingly desperate, searching back streets and side streets and cul-de-sacs to no avail, widening our search to streets miles from anywhere we knew the car could possibly be. As the day drew on, we understood that even if we found it, Dad’s blue Peugeot with his press pass tucked in the sun-visor and his cameras in the boot, our search would still have been hopeless. Of course it had been towed away. I found the number, called the compound and said to the man on the phone that the owner of the vehicle couldn’t collect it because he was dead. He was my father. That he didn’t mean to leave the car there but he died. That he really didn’t mean to leave it. Lunatic sentences, deadpan, cut from rock. I didn’t understand his embarrassed silence. He said, ‘Sorry, oh God. I’m so sorry’, but he could have said anything at all and it would have signified nothing. We had to take Dad’s death certificate to the compound to avoid the towing fee. This also signified nothing. After the funeral I went back to Cambridge. I didn’t sleep. I drove around a lot. I stared at the sun going down and the sun coming up, and the sun in between. I watched the pigeons spreading their tails and courting each other in stately pavanes on the lawn outside my house. Planes still landed, cars still drove, people still shopped and talked and worked. None of these things made any sense at all. For weeks I felt I was made of dully burning metal. That’s what it was like; so much so that I was convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that if you’d put me on a bed or a chair I would have burned right through. It was about this time a kind of madness drifted in. Looking back, I think I was never truly mad. More mad north-north-west. I could tell a hawk from a handsaw always, but sometimes it was striking to me how similar they were.

• From City of Night (1963)

  At 17, I dreaded growing old. Old age is something that must never happen to me. The image of myself in the mirror must never fade into someone I cant look at. And even after a series of after-school jobs, my feeling of isolation from others only increased. Then the army came, and for months I hadnt spoken to my father. (We would sit at the table eating silently, ignoring each other.) And when I left, that terrible morning, I kissed my mother. And briefly I looked at my father. His eyes were watering. Mutely he held out the ruby-ring which once, long ago, he had given me and then taken back. And I took it wordlessly. And in that instant I wanted to hold him— because he was crying, because he did feel something for me, because, I was sure, he was overwhelmed at that moment by the Loss I felt too. I wanted to hold him then as I had wanted to so many, many times as a child, and if I could have spoken, I know I would have said at last: “I love you.” But that sense of loss choked me—and I walked out without speaking to him.... Only a few weeks later, in Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky, I received a telegram that he was very sick. And I came back to El Paso. I felt certain that this time it would be different. I reached our house, in the government projects we had moved into from that house with the winged cockroaches, and I got in with the key I had kept. There is no one home. I called my brother. My father was dead. I hang up the telephone and I know that now Forever I will have no father, that he had been unfound, that as long as he had been alive there was a chance, and that we would be, Always now, strangers, and that is when I knew what Death really is—not in the physical discovery of the Nothingness which the death of my dog Winnie had brought me (in the decayed body which would turn into dirt, rejected by Heaven) but in the knowledge that my Father was gone, for me —that there was no way to reach him now—that his Death would exist only for me, who am living. And throughout the days that followed—and will follow forever—I will discover him in my memories, and hopelessly—through the infinite miles that separate life from death—try to understand his torture: in searching out the shape of my own. The army passed like something unreal, and I returned to my Mother and her hungry love. And left her, standing that morning by the kitchen door crying, as she always would be in my mind, and I was on my way now to Chicago, briefly—from where I would go to freedom: New York!—embarking on that journey through nightcities and nightlives—looking for I dont know what—perhaps some substitute for salvation.